1) Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the cable television field and, more particularly, to methods and devices for testing and provisioning a cable television system.
2) Background Art
The cable television (CATV) industry has evolved over the years from just providing remote areas with television signals, to a full-fledged industry providing entertainment to the home. During this evolution, technology has increased in complexity with reverse channel capability and bandwidth growing from 400 MHz to 750 MHz, and now to 1 GHz. The quality of signals has also improved with the deployment of fiber optic systems which drive the signals deep into each neighborhood. From there the signal is carried on coaxial cable, and tapped for the customer drop. Even with the evolution of the technology in signal quality and channel carrying capacity, there are a number of routine testing and provisioning activities which still require a costly dispatch to handle.
Testability of the coaxial signal quality at the customer interface is still an on-site type of test procedure. While trunk and feeder coaxial signals have been capable of remote monitoring for years, tests on the coaxial cable drop today are usually a manual function requiring a technician to visit the customer and perform diagnostics using portable test equipment. This is undesirable from a service standpoint since it can take a protracted amount of time for a technician to be dispatched, identify the trouble and repair it if required. From a network operator's standpoint, the customers' coaxial cable drops may represent over 50% of the deployed miles of coaxial cable in a newer broadband delivery system, which makes these drops a prime target for testability.
In previous methods for measuring the quality of the CATV signals, many alternatives have been proposed. One such example is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,207,431. In this patent, centralized monitoring of a CATV system is proposed using monitoring points in the network and sending a signal back to a central location using the reverse channel transmission capability within the CATV system itself. This patent, however, does not disclose circuitry for monitoring the output of a communications system and transmitting such output over either the telephone network or the broadband network.
Provisioning issues associated with the chum rate of customers and illegal connections to the system are a major concern. Even with a small monthly percentage of churn, the number of dispatches required for disconnects and reconnects equates to a sizable annual maintenance and administrative expense. Additionally, the lost monthly revenue associated with illegal connections to the CATV system can amount to a significant lost profit potential. Even with a low churn rate and a small percentage of illegal connections, these costs can amount to millions of dollars per year.
In the past, to achieve activation and deactivation of signals in a CATV system, many systems have been proposed. One such example is the television signal distribution exemplified in U.S. Pat. No. 3,968,327. This patent describes a centralized system for remotely enabling or disabling the viewing of special transmitted signals in a coaxial cable distribution system using the telephone network for communications. This apparatus allows the display of selected channels on selected receivers, but does not interfere with the other nonselected transmitted channels. This patent, however, does not disclose circuitry for enabling and disabling the entire transmit and receive capability of a coaxial delivery system to selected subscribers.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for the provisioning of signals on a broadband coaxial network to customer equipment from a remote location utilizing one or a combination of the broadband network and a telephone network.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for testing one or a combination of the broadband network and customer equipment from a remote location utilizing one or a combination of the broadband network and the telephone network.